The rich avoid tax because we let them

As an effective political lobby, you really have to hand it to the very wealthy. Yesterday it emerged that Starbucks has paid just £8.6 million in corporation tax on sales of £3 billion (less than one per cent) over the past 14 years, thanks to a variety of — legal — accounting tricks. Starbucks’s UK operation, for instance, pays six per cent of its sales for using the parent company’s “intellectual property”.

This follows similar revelations about Facebook and Amazon, both of which pay minimal UK tax — Amazon on annual sales of £3 billion — thanks to legal tax avoidance techniques.

If this were a question of benefit claimants claiming millions on a legal technicality, Tory MPs and their cheerleaders would be baying for blood. As it is, they shrug their shoulders and mumble about “wealth creators”. The implicit argument is that the wealthy always find ways around paying tax on their income — so why bother tightening up?

One alternative is to target wealth rather than income — especially wealth that’s hard to hide. Yet the Tories are outraged at Liberal Democrat proposals to do just that, via a “mansion tax” on properties worth more than £2 million. The value over £2 million would be taxed at one per cent: the owner of a £4 million house would pay £20,000 a year.

Nationally, maybe 0.25 per cent of homes are in the £2 million-plus bracket; in London, estimates put them at between 1.2 and two per cent of the total. Just 1,518 such homes were sold nationwide last year. Vince Cable’s charge this week that the Tories oppose the tax because it would hit “their friends” looks like a pretty simple statement of fact to me.

Not that the mansion tax will ever happen: this is really about Lib-Dem positioning. And in any case it would be simpler to create new council tax bands. The highest band at present, Band H, is for houses worth more than £320,000 in 1991 — hard to put an average value on today, but less than £2 million. So at present, the millionaires at One Hyde Park pay council tax of £1,365 a year on flats worth up to £136 million.

By way of comparison, a report in yesterday’s New York Times highlights an $88 million apartment at 15 Central Park West that attracted property taxes of $59,000; without a complicated tax break, the tax would have been $145,000.

Critics point to the alleged plight of little old ladies in big houses — straw little old ladies, I fear — and to the potential flight of the super-rich. But are the latter really all going to condemn themselves to lives in Zug or Dubai? I think we should call their bluff.

Their satraps will whine about the “politics of envy”. When that one’s wheeled out, I take it as indicating a direct hit.

I’ve no sympathy for the old devils at these prices

It’s hard not to note the advanced ages of the Rolling Stones as they announce their 50th anniversary tour: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards both turn 70 next year and Charlie Watts is already 71, while Ron Wood is a spry 65. But we might have to get used to it as the first rock ’n’ roll generation heads into old age. Never mind young lads like Bob Dylan (71), Paul McCartney (70) and the Who (Pete Townshend, 67, and Roger Daltrey, 68). Keef has expressed admiration for the way the blues legends just kept going and still do: BB King, who appeared at Glastonbury last year, is still playing at age 87.

If Jagger and co are still prancing — or at least shuffling — around at that age, most of the audience will be OAPs too. I’d be 65. Though whether my generation of rockers will be able to afford Stones tickets (top price this year: £375) on our rubbish pensions is another matter.

Boris’s Tube delusion

Whatever happened to driverless Tube trains, one of the Mayor’s grander election promises? Today, the Mayor is grilled by London Assembly members on the subject. Last week plans were quietly kicked into the long grass: London Underground managing director Mike Brown told this paper that any such trains were a long way off. TfL says 2020 “at the earliest” — though that now looks wildly optimistic.

I wasn’t surprised, since that’s exactly what the straight-talking Brown told me last year: it isn’t technically feasible any earlier in London, whatever the union objections. What I was surprised by was Boris’s subsequent pre-election insistence that “I want to be the Mayor to deliver that”.

When I pointed out TfL’s scepticism to Boris’s then spin doctor, Guto Harri, he countered that Boris wanted to press ahead with “planning, financing, commissioning and starting to trial them over the next four years”, though he conceded that Boris “might need to seek a third term to finish the work under way”. Indeed — or even a fourth or fifth. And by then, his blondness will have moved on from the driverless Tube that is City Hall.

Boles the bodger builder

This week planning minister Nick Boles has defended moves to relax planning regulations on home extensions, despite predictions of disaster from town hall chiefs. He should take care. Few things enrage Middle Englanders — voters in, say, Boles’s Grantham constituency — more than a grandiose conservatory mushrooming next door to overshadow their patio.

Learn from the master, Tony Blair. In one of the volumes of his excellent diaries, A View from the Foothills, former Labour minister Chris Mullin recounts his efforts in 1999 to curb the scourge of suburbia, leylandii: he was outraged to be stopped by No 10, who said Blair aide Anji Hunter was nervous. Mullin was told: “The Prime Minister values her political antennae.”

She was right: when neighbours start squabbling, wise politicians get well out of the way. It would be a terrible shame if Boles’s name entered the language as a synonym for a tasteless garage extension: “Look! The Boyds are putting up a ruddy great Boles, how dare they!”